“They’ll cycle—once. But without power, we’re gonna have to set off the firing pins to open them.”
Devore gawked. “We’re not going out there!” They were still at terminal velocity. But Korsin was moving, too, bustling past his brother to the port viewport. “Everyone, to either side!”
Seelah and another crewman stepped to the right pane. Devore, glaring, reluctantly joined her. Alone on the left, Yaru Korsin placed his hand on the coldly sweating portal. Outside, meters away, he found one of the massive circular covers—and the small box mounted to its side, no larger than a comlink. It was smaller than he remembered from inspection. Where’s the mechanism? There. He reached out through the Force. Careful …
“Top torpedo door, both sides. Now!”
With a determined mental act, Korsin triggered the firing pin. A large bolt released explosively, shooting ahead—and the mammoth tube cover moved in response, rotating on its single hinge. The ship, already quaking, groaned loudly as the door reached its final position, perched atop the plane of the Omen like a makeshift aileron. Korsin looked expectantly behind him, where Seelah’s expression assured him of a similar success on her side. Like many of the Sith believers aboard, she had been trained in the use of the Force—but Korsin had never considered using it to make in-flight corrections before. For a moment, he wondered if it had worked …
Thoom! With a wrenching jolt that leveled the bridge crew, Omen tipped downward. It didn’t slow the ship as much as Korsin had expected, but that wasn’t the point. At least they could see where they were going now, what was below. If these blasted clouds would clear …
At once, he saw it. Land, indeed—but more water. Much more. Jagged, rugged peaks rose from a greenish surf, almost a skeleton of rock lit by the alien planet’s setting sun, barely visible on the horizon. They were rocketing quickly into night. There wouldn’t be much time to make a decision …
… but Korsin already knew there was no choice to be made. While more of the crew might survive a water landing, they wouldn’t last long when their superiors learned their precious cargo was at the bottom of an alien ocean. Better they pick the crystals out from among our burned corpses. Frowning, he ordered the Force-users on the starboard side to activate their lower torpedo doors.
Again, a violent lurch, and Omen banked left, angling toward an angry line of mountains. Rearward, a lifepod shot away from the ship—and slammed straight into the ridge. The searing plume was gone from the bridge’s field of view in less than a second. Gloyd’s torpedo crew would be envious, Korsin thought, shaking his head and blowing out a big breath. Still people alive back there. They’re still trying.
Omen cleared a snow-covered peak by less than a hundred meters. Dark water opened up below. Another course correction—and Omen was quickly running out of torpedo tubes. Another lifepod launched, arcing down and away. Only when the small craft neared the surf did its pilot—if it had one—get the engine going. The rockets shot the pod straight down into the ocean at full speed.
Squinting through sweat, Korsin looked back at his crew. “Depth charge! Fine time for a mixed warfare drill!” Even Gloyd didn’t laugh at that one. But it wasn’t propriety, the captain saw as he turned. It was what was ahead. More sharp mountains rising from the waters—including a mountain meant for them. Korsin reeled back to his chair. “Stations!”
Seelah wandered in a panic, nearly losing the wailing Jariad as she staggered. She had no station, no defensive position. She began to cross to Devore, frozen at his terminal. There was no time. A hand reached for her. Yaru yanked her close, pushing her down behind the command chair into a protective crouch.
The act cost him.
Omen slammed into a granite ridge at an angle, losing the fight—and still more of itself. The impact threw Captain Korsin forward against the bulkhead, nearly impaling him on the remaining shards of the smashed viewport. Gloyd and Marcom strained to move toward him, but Omen was still on the move, clipping another rocky rise and spiraling downward. Something exploded, strewing flaming wreckage in the ship’s grinding wake.
Agonizingly, Omen spun forward again, the torpedo doors that had been their makeshift airbrakes snapping like driftwood as it slid. Down a gravelly incline it skidded, showering stones in all directions. Korsin, his forehead bleeding, looked up and out to see—
—nothing. Omen continued to slide toward an abyss. It had run out of mountain.
Stop. Stop!
“Stop!”
Silence. Korsin coughed and opened his eyes.
They were still alive.
“No,” Seelah said, kneeling and clinging to Jariad. “We’re already dead.”
Thanks to you, she did not say—but Korsin felt the words streaming at him through the Force. He didn’t need the help. Her eyes said plenty.
2
Omen’s permanent crew came from the same human stock as Korsin: the debris of a noble house, launched skyward centuries before in the whirlwind that formed the Tapani Empire. The Sith had found them, and found them useful. They were skilled in commerce and industry, all the things the Sith Lords needed most but never had time for with their world-building and world-destroying. His ancestors ran ships and factories, and ran them well. And before long, mingling their blood with that of the Dark Jedi, the Force was in his people, too.
They were the future. They couldn’t acknowledge it, but it was obvious. Many of the Sith Lords were still of the crimson-hued species that had long formed the nucleus of their following. But the numbers were turning—and if Naga Sadow wanted to rule the galaxy, they had to.
Naga Sadow. Tentacle-faced, Dark Lord and heir to ancient powers. It was Naga Sadow who had dispatched Omen and Harbinger in search of Lignan crystals; Naga Sadow who needed the crystals on Kirrek, to defeat the Republic and its Jedi.
Or was it the Jedi and their Republic? It didn’t matter. Naga Sadow would kill Captain Korsin and his crew for losing their ship. Seelah was right about that much.
Yet Sadow need not lose the war, depending on what Korsin did now. He still had something. The crystals.
But the crystals were high above at the moment.
It had been a night of horrors, getting 355 people down from the lofty plateau. Sixteen injured had died along the way, and another five had tumbled into the darkness from the narrow ledge that formed the only apparent way up or down. No one doubted that evacuation had been the right call, though. They couldn’t stay up there, not with the fires still burning and Omen precariously perched. The last to leave the ship, Korsin had nearly soiled himself when one of the proton torpedoes had disengaged from the naked tube, tumbling over the precipice and into oblivion.
By sunrise, they’d found a clearing, halfway down the mountain, dotted with wild grasses. Life was everywhere in the galaxy, even here. It was the first good sign. Above, Omen continued to burn. No need to wonder where above them the ship was, Korsin thought. Not while they could follow the smoke.
Now, walking back into the afternoon crowd—less an encampment than a gathering—Korsin knew he never need wonder where his people were, either. Not while his nose worked. “Now I know why we kept the Massassi on their own level,” he said to no one.
“Charming,” came a response from over his shoulder. “I should say they are not very happy with you, either.” Ravilan was a Red Sith, pure-blooded as they came. He was quartermaster and keeper of the Massassi, the nasty lumbering bipeds that the Sith prized as instruments of terror on the battlefield. At the moment the Massassi didn’t seem so formidable. Korsin followed Ravilan into the fiendish circle, made even less pleasant by the stench of vomit. Florid monsters two and three meters tall sprawled on the ground, heaving and coughing.
“Maybe some kind of pulmonary edema,” Seelah said, passing around purified-air canisters salvaged from an emergency pack. Before connecting with Devore and securing a place on his team, she’d been a battlefield medic—though Korsin couldn’t tell from her bedside manner, at least with Massassi. She
barely touched the wheezing giants. “We’re no longer at elevation, so this should subside. Probably normal.”
To her left, another Massassi hacked mightily—and mutely regarded the result: a handful of dripping scar tissue. Korsin looked at the quartermaster and asked drily, “Is that normal?”
“You know it’s not,” Ravilan snarled.
From across the clearing, Devore Korsin charged in, shoving his son into Seelah’s hands before she was done wiping them. He seized the brute’s massive wrist, looking for himself. His eyes flared at his brother. “But Massassi are tougher than anything!”
“Anything they can punch, kick, or strangle,” the captain said. An alien planet, however, was an alien planet. They hadn’t had time to do a bioscan. And all the equipment was high above. Devore followed Seelah, backing away from the sickly Massassi.
Eighty of the creatures had survived the crash. The captain learned that Ravilan’s assistants were burning a third of those survivors, even then, over the hillside. Whatever unseen thing it was on this planet that was killing the Massassi, it was doing it quickly. Ravilan showed him the stinking pyre.
“They’re not far enough away,” Korsin said.
“From whom?” Ravilan responded. “Is that depression a permanent camp? Should we remove to a different mountain?”
“Enough, Rav.”
“No witty comeback? I’m surprised. You at least plan that far ahead.”
Korsin had fenced with Ravilan on earlier missions, but now wasn’t the time. “I said, enough. We’ve surveyed below. You saw it. There’s nowhere to go.” There were beaches at the bottom of the bluff, but they terminated against the oily cliffs that began the next mountain in the chain. And going farther along the chain meant trips through tangles of razor-sharp brambles. “We don’t need an expedition. We’re not staying.”
“I should hope not,” Ravilan said, his own nose turned by the smell of the fires. “Your brother—I mean, Eldrak Korsin’s other son—wants to return to the ship right away. I agree. We must report to Lord Sadow.”
Yaru Korsin stopped. “I have the transmitter codes. It’s my call to make.” He looked up at the second, more distant smoky plume far above. “When it’s safe.”
“Yes, by all means. When it’s safe.”
The captain hadn’t wanted Devore on the mission. Years earlier, he had been relieved when his half brother had abandoned a naval career, drifting into the Sith’s mineralogical service. Power and riches were more easily had there, searching for gems and Force-imbued crystals. With their father’s sponsorship, Devore had become a specialist in using plasma weapons and scanning equipment. The recent conflict with the Jedi found him in high demand—and assigned, with his team, to Omen. Korsin wondered whom he’d played a joke on to deserve that. He’d been told Devore officially answered to him, but that would have been a first. Not even Sith Lords were that powerful.
“You should have kept us in orbit!”
“We were never in orbit!”
Korsin recognized the voice of the navigator, Marcom, coming from over the dusty rise. He already knew the other one.
Old Marcom was trying to push his way out of the crowd when Captain Korsin topped the hill at a full run. Devore’s miners weren’t letting their victim go. “You don’t know my job!” Marcom yelled. “I did all that I could! Oh, what’s the use talking to …”
Just as Korsin reached the clearing, the crowd surged forward, as if pulled down a drain. One sickeningly familiar crackle followed another.
“No!”
Korsin saw the lightsaber first, rolling toward his feet when he breached the crowd. His father’s old helmsman lay ahead, gutted. Next to Seelah and Jariad stood Devore, his lightsaber glowing crimson in the lengthening shadows.
“The navigator attacked first,” Seelah said.
The captain gawked.
“What difference does it make?” Korsin charged into the center, lifting the loose lightsaber into his hand with the Force. Devore stood his ground, smiling gently and keeping his lightsaber burning. His dark eyes had a wild look, a familiar one. He was shaking a little, but not from fear—not fear Yaru Korsin could feel. The captain knew it was something else, something more dangerous. He turned Marcom’s unlit weapon tip-down and shook it. “That was our navigator, Devore! What if the star charts don’t work?”
“I can find our way back,” Devore said smartly.
“You’ll have to!” Korsin grew conscious of the mix around him. Gold-uniformed miners in the circle, yes, but bridge crew, too. A red-faced Sith—not Ravilan, but one of his cronies. He was undeterred. “This is not going to do any good, any of you. We wait here until it’s safe to return to the ship. That’s all.”
Seelah straightened, emboldened by the supporters around. “When will it be safe? In days? Weeks?” Her child wailed. “How long must we last—until it’s safe enough for you?”
Korsin stared at her and breathed deeply. He threw Marcom’s lightsaber to the ground. “Tell Ravilan there’s one more for the pyre.” As a begrudging crowd gave him room to exit, he said, “We go when I say. That ship blows up, or tips into the ocean, and we really will have problems. We go when I say.”
The world spun. As Korsin stepped backward, Gloyd stepped forward, keeping a wary yellow eye on the grumbling masses. He’d missed the fun.
“Captain.”
They looked past each other, watching Sith in all directions. “Not really happy here, Gloyd.”
“Then you’ll want to hear this,” the hulking Houk rasped. “As I see it, we’ve got three choices. We get these people off this rock in whatever will fly. Or we look for cover and hide until they all kill one another.”
“What’s the third choice?”
Gloyd’s painted face crinkled. “There isn’t one. But I figured it’d cheer you up if you thought there was.”
“I hate you.”
“Hate’s good. Maybe you can be Dark Lord of the Sith someday.” Korsin had known Gloyd since his first command. The Houk was the kind of bridge officer every Sith captain wanted: more interested in his own job than in taking someone else’s. Gloyd was smart to spare himself the trouble. Or maybe he just loved blowing things up too much to want to leave the tactical station.
Of course, with that station left roughly a kilometer up the mountain, Korsin had no idea how useful his old ally would be. But Gloyd still had fifty kilos on most of the crew. No one would move against them while they stood together.
No one would move alone, anyway.
Korsin looked back across the clearing at the mob. Ravilan was there now, huddled with Devore and Seelah and a couple of junior officers. Devore spotted his brother watching and averted his gaze; Seelah simply stared back at the commander, unabashed. Korsin spat an epithet. “Gloyd, we’re dying here. I don’t understand them!”
“Yeah, you do,” Gloyd said. “You know what we say: You and me, we’re about the job. Other Sith are about what’s next.” The Houk plucked a scaly root from the ground and sniffed it. “Trouble is, this whole place is about what’s next. You’re trying to keep ’em together—when you’ve really got to show ’em there’s something after this rock. There’s no time to win people over. You pick a path. Anybody won’t walk it …”
“Push ’em off?” Korsin grinned. It really wasn’t his style. Gloyd returned the smile and sank his teeth into the root. Wincing comically, the gunnery chief excused himself. They wouldn’t be living off the land—not this land, anyway.
Looking past the crowd, Korsin found his eyes drifting up toward the shrinking tendril of smoke drifting from the heights above.
Above. Gloyd was right. It was the only way.
3
The Massassi had died on the mountain. Korsin had left at dawn with three bearers: the healthiest of the Massassi, each passing around the remaining air canister. It hadn’t lasted, and neither had they. Whatever it was on this planet that didn’t like Massassi existed up above as well as below.
It was
just as well, Korsin thought, leaving the blood-colored corpses where they fell. He couldn’t run Massassi. They were pliant and obedient warriors, but they answered to force, not words. A good Sith captain needed to use both, but Korsin leaned more on the latter. It had made for a good career.
Not down the mountain, though. Things were going to get worse. They already had. It had been cold in the night—chillier than he had expected from what seemed like an oceanic climate. Some of the heavily injured had failed from exposure or from lack of medical care.
Later, some kind of animal—Gloyd described it to him as a six-legged mammal, half mouth—vaulted from a burrow and tore into one of the injured. It took five exhausted sentries to slay the beast. One of Devore’s mining specialists cast a chunk of the creature’s body into the campfire and sampled a piece. She vomited blood and died within heartbeats. The captain was glad he hadn’t been awake to see that.
Whatever relief there was in knowing there was life on the planet ended right there. Omen’s crew didn’t number enough to sort out what was safe and what wasn’t. They had to go home, regardless of the state of things with the ship.
Korsin looked up into the morning sky, now streaked more by cirrus clouds than smoke. He hadn’t told the others about the thing that had struck the viewport during the descent. What had he seen? Another predator, probably. There was no point in bringing it up. Everyone was scared enough, and fear led to anger. The Sith understood this—they made use of it—but uncontrolled, it wasn’t doing them any good. The sun hadn’t even set before lightsabers came out again in a dispute over a foodpak. One less Red Sith. Not twenty standard hours since the crash and things were starting to get basic. Tribal.
Lost Tribe of the Sith: The Collected Stories Page 2